Welcome New Readers
Lynne Kiesling Glad to have ya! So this is what happens when you get Instalanched andFarked …
August 2005
Moralizing About Suvs
Lynne Kiesling On the gas price note, Jonathan Pearce at Samizdata has a post about how high gas prices are more effective than scolding at inducing people to drive more fuel efficient vehicles. Glenn Reynolds also has a lengthy and informative post on the SUV, including a link to Jonathan’s. Glenn correctly points out that …
Hawaii Institutes Wholesale Gas Price Cap
Lynne Kiesling It’s been brewing for several years, but finally the $66/barrel oil prices have induced Hawaii to impose a cap on the wholesale price of gasoline. On Wednesday, the state’s Public Utilities Commission released its first weekly list of price caps for different parts of the state. Including taxes, the maximum wholesalers in Honolulu …
Cafe = Completely Absurd Fuel Economy Standards
Michael Giberson As the price of a product goes up, so does the propensity of politicians to want to do something. Gasoline prices are up, and here come the politicians. The Senate Energy Committee has announced it will be holding hearings in September. And now comes the Bush administration with a proposal to revise and …
More On Power Markets And Reliability
Michael Giberson A reader points out a newspaper article that amplifies the point I was making yesterday concerning electric power markets and reliability. Peter Key writes in the Philadelphia Business Journal: Improved coordination among power-grid operators and the spread of locational pricing of electricity are two reasons why [the grid has operated smoothly during this …
Significant Improvement Since The Blackout?
Michael Giberson As it happens, Vernon Smith?s column in the WSJ (discussed by Lynne here) wasn?t the only public marking of the two-year anniversary of the August 14, 2003 blackout. A number of newspaper stories and opinion columns have marked the event. Of particular interest are the comments of two people that are particularly well …
Is President Bush A Smithian?
Lynne Kiesling Detroit News columnist Thomas Bray argued so on Sunday. In fact, his argument is more along the lines of his being more Smithian than Keynesian (as is Doug Allen’s at Catallarchy, from whom I got the link): President Bush responded to the bursting of the economic bubble of the late 1990s in quite …
Ba Strikes, Catering, Outsourcing, Contracting
Lynne Kiesling Yesterday, while under the gun to finish some edits and a referee report, I listened to BBC Radio 4. One memorable interview was with a union organizer discussing the recent BA sympathy strike with the fired workers from caterer Gate Gourmet. One of the contentions in this situation is that in the market …
The Bike Is Good For The Soul
Lynne Kiesling There are few better ways to start a sunny summer Friday than an early morning bike ride on Chicago’s lakefront. Breathtakingly, stunningly gorgeous, and a great way to clear the mind for a day of thinking about complexity, dynamics, and electricity policy. This will be a biking weekend, too, so running across this …
Willingness To Pay To Avoid Extinction
Lynne Kiesling How cool is this? Tim at Environmental Economics points us to an upcoming Sotheby’s auction of saplings from a tree thought to be extinct. This is a nice example of a field experiment in something that is awfully difficult to do: determining aggregate willingness to pay to avoid extinction. In my environmental economics …